April 5, 2005

April 5, 2005

A new research group in Stanford’s School of Engineering is pioneering plasmonics, which combines the bandwidth of photonics and the smallness of electronics.

Surface plasmons are density waves of electrons—picture bunches of electrons passing a point regularly—along the surface of a metal. Plasmons have the same frequencies and electromagnetic fields as light, but their sub-wavelength size means they take up less space. Plasmonics, then, is the technology of transmitting… read more

April 3, 2005

Ray Kurzweil has been named one of 16 “revolutionaries” by PBS in its upcoming PBS television series, “Who made America,” joining Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and other major American inventors.

“American history is filled with the stories of influential innovators, whose ideas and entrepreneurial spirit gave birth to commercial milestones like the steamboat and cultural touchstones like the Barbie doll,”… read more

April 3, 2005

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive: 230 billion bits per square inch, which would make possible a desktop computer drive capable of storing a terabyte of information.

The technology is known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end.

April 1, 2005

Moore’s law will likely begin to slow down to a three-year cycle in the next decade and require companies to adopt alternative technologies.

Some say the ability to shrink transistors will start to become problematic by around 2010. Others, such as Intel’s director of technology strategy, Paolo Gargini, paint a more gradual picture. Around 2015, they say, manufacturers will start to move toward hybrid chips, which combine elements of… read more

April 1, 2005

A 3-millimeter-wide chip designed to fit behind the retina has returned a degree of vision to blind rats, a first step towards creating a system for humans.

The patient would wear goggles mounted with a small video camera, which sends the image to a wireless wallet-sized computer for processing. The computer transmits this information to an infrared LED screen on the goggles.

March 31, 2005

Federal officials are planning to compile a comprehensive catalog of the genetic abnormalities that characterize cancer, in hopes of discovering important new clues about how to diagnose, prevent, and treat cancer.

The proposed Human Cancer Genome Project would be greater in scale than the Human Genome Project. Its goal: determine the DNA sequence of thousands of tumor samples. Researchers would look for mutations that give rise to cancer or… read more

March 30, 2005

Humans are damaging the planet at a rapid rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or “dead zones” in the seas, the international Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report says.

March 30, 2005

As more genomes are sequenced, researchers are looking to bring their computations in line with the underlying biology. They are creating software that incorporates phylogenetics, the descriptions of evolutionary distance, into the field’s favorite computational tool, the hidden Markov model (HMM).

HMMs “describe a probability distribution over an infinite number of sequences,” says Sean Eddy, associate professor at Washington University and coauthor of the textbook, Biological Sequence Analysis: Probabilistic… read more

March 30, 2005

NASA Astronaut Journal, Mars, 2034:

The latest spacecraft sent to us is more a living thing than a robot. Shortly after launch from Earth, the tiny capsule blossomed into a sail and rode the solar wind to Mars. On the way, a meteoroid punched a hole in the sail, but surrounding material flowed in and closed the tear.

Upon arrival, the spacecraft shrunk more than 100 times its… read more

March 30, 2005

While artificial intelligence can perform numerous job functions, it brings no ethical considerations to bear on the tasks performed — a skill that futurist Richard Samson predicts will actually become more crucial as the world increases its reliance on technology.

March 30, 2005

Oregon State University researchers hope to use the diatom algaie’s shell-building process to manufacture nanotech materials, incorporating elements such as silicon, germanium, titanium, and gallium into the diatoms’ silica shells.

Products may include flexible computer screens, cheap and efficient solar cells, filtration devices, and drug delivery vehicles that can target, for example, a single cancer cell.